Honourable mention: Pig Blood Vampire

I have sat and wondered how to write up this 2020 film, directed by Nick Josephs, and probably the first thing to say is that it isn’t a vampire film (despite the title) but it does have a moment within it that would allow for an Honourable mention.

Indeed, I can’t really say that I overly know what the film was; surreally absurdist and strange, it bills as a satire but I couldn’t say I understood what it was satirising so much (that isn’t to say that it wasn’t, just that I didn’t ken the frame of reference.) That said it was engaging, in its own, weird way.

not blood

It follows a man, credited as Pig Blood Vampire (Nick Josephs), who is tall, wears slightly gothic formal clothing and is an actor. He also suffers from face blindness, or prosopagnosia, a brain disorder that prevents the sufferer from being able to recognise faces (and facial expressions), often from brain injury or stroke (though it can be congenital), and is not treatable in and of itself and treatments are actually the development of coping strategies. I don’t think the film overtly poked fun at the condition in any nasty way, but neither did it explore the trauma of suffering from it in a meaningful way.

on the floor

As the film starts, he is led on the floor of the kitchen as (vegetarian, by the unappetising, processed look of it) bacon sizzles in the pan. He says that he has killed a pig. A woman, credited as French girlfriend (Marie Grujicic-Delage), enters and suggests she is leaving (him it sounds like, but she is smiling all the way through and he seems simply nonplussed). He then has a run-in with Roscoe (S. Scott McCracken) and his good old boys. Roscoe is running for congress, but even so he decides to spend the film harassing the man – this takes the form of dressing as police (knowing he won’t recognise them) and, at other times, wearing pig masks whilst hanging round his property.

the "vampires"

So, the moment in the film that gets it an honourable mention. The PBV drives to a vampire convention. On his way in he meets Violet (Sara Young Chandler), who has been ejected for spilling a little blood. They walk towards the place, he is expected as an actor, and three ‘vampires’ (Paul Krantz (Kiss my Ashes), Andrew Colarusso and Shudan Wang) offer a quick set of pretentious lines and Violet drags PBV away from the convention to give her a ride. And that’s it, we don’t see in the convention but we do get a fleeting visitation of three people acting like vampires. The red liquid PBV drinks at home, which fits into the vampire mystique, is cherry juice and he is a vegetarian (hence, I guess, the insipid looking bacon).

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK